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Don't patents have a 'must defend' clause in them for them to continue to be valid?

IANAL, but as far as I know that's not a requirement. You can patent stuff you invent without ever suing anyone afterwards, or you can offer free licenses, or whatever.
Trademarks do have such a clause (or something similar), however.

It's the opposite, really. A hedge is something you do in case your bet fails, so since insurance is a hedge, the wager cannot be that you're going to die. You bet/wager that you're going to keep living, and you hedge that bet by getting insurance just in case.

AFAIK the Slashdot editors didn't censor your posts, as they can still be seen on your user page, along with here and here. However, they might have decided that it wasn't good enough to be featured on the front page, as happens with countless other submissions. You might disagree, but that's just how Slashdot works: curated content.

As for the supposed impossibility to post that story anywhere, it was posted on Reddit and actually made the front page of the Technology subreddit. Soulskill even gave his point of view on the matter in the comments. I don't know where you see that conspiracy of yours, but I don't see it at all.

Copyright and trademark are two different beasts. Copyright allows you to control who gets the right to copy your work. As such, you can give out licenses, for free or for a fee, since its purpose is exactly that: being able to profit from your work. Whether aggressive copyright enforcement is the best way to do that is a whole other story. =P

The purpose of trademark is not the same at all. Trademarks are used to protect a brand's image. They are issued to prevent brand dilution (the brand becoming a generic term, as happened with Kleenex) and brand confusion (somebody else passing a lesser product as a better known brand, hurting the latter's reputation). Because the intent of a trademark is to preserve the uniqueness your brand, you are not allowed to knowingly let someone else use it. If you did, it would weaken any later trademark claims you made since you'd have permitted others to make your brand less unique. This is why Jack Daniel's says they are forced to send the cease and desist letter.

Regarding whether this is an American thing or not, I do not know. I think it also applies here in Canada, but then again IANAL so I can't say for sure. =)

Exactly, which is why I think this authentication system isn't supposed to replace the good old login screen - not for everyone, anyway. It will probably only be used by enthusiasts and high-sec employees for whom getting tortured for their password is an actual threat.

Actually, the system tries to see if you perform better on the password sequence than the other, random ones, which would mean that you're the user that has been trained with that password. The worst case with IIDX players is just that if they are so pro that they perfect every note, they'll perform equally on every sequence and as such will be locked out of the system. While this is a flaw in the system, it's a false negative, not a false positive.

reddit is really a collection of sections pertaining to different subjects, called subreddits. As such, your experience on reddit will vary wildly depending on which subreddits you subscribe to, as they each have difference themes, rules and degrees of moderation. For example,/r/pics is pretty much a catch-all place for any midly interesting picture, and as such posts there probably won't lead to deep, insightful discussion in the comment section. However, if you swing by/r/askscience, you'll get a whole other experience. The moderators there strictly enforce the rules and quickly delete any off-topic jokes and memes, leaving only on-topic comments./r/iama, where CmdrTaco posted, contains Q/A sessions from people ranging from celebrities to normal people with interesting stories. There is a huge amount of subreddits, so you'll probably find a bunch that are to your liking./r/tf2 for Team Fortress 2./r/nyc for stuff about New York City./r/comics for, well, comic strips./r/technology for tech news and discussion. There's/r/programming,/r/buildapc,/r/talesfromtechsupport,/r/football,/r/philosophy... There's a subreddit for pretty much everything. Of course, it also means that there will be a lot of subreddit that you don't care about. Just don't subscribe to them and you won't have to see those posts. A big part of reddit is tailoring your subreddit subscriptions to whatever you'd like to see. If you don't do that, you'll only get the default subs, and judging by your comment here I'd guess you're not happy with those.

So if you want to see if reddit can be interesting for you, my advice would be this:

First, go to this page, which lists which subreddits you'll see on the front page. If you have just created an account, you'll be subscribed to the default subreddits. Look at the posts in each one and decide if you want to keep seeing content like this. If not, click the "unsubscribe" button near the top of the sidebar and boom, it's gone. Just this step will generally increase you reddit experience greatly.

Next, you can search for a topic and look at the subreddits you find. If you'd like to see more, subscribe, then search some more until you feel that your front page contains stuff you're interested in.

That's pretty much it. I like that system, but as with everything, YMMV. =)

I think his point is that hasty decisions, justified or not, are more error-prone than thought out ones. I've seen a lot of witch hunts on the Internet that were caused by hasty judgements and were followed by awkward apologies when exonerating evidence was later unearthed. Your post, while (IMO) correctly underlining the failings of the patent system, contained an error because you "got carried away". While an error in a/. post is generally of little consequence, judicial rulings tend to have more far reaching consequences, and I would also like them to be the result of careful thought rather than knee-jerk, error-prone reactions.